alt Hacker NewsIt doesn't make sense even for academia. Reproducibility is an issue and as we've seen with recent fraudulent claims in major publications - it's what is going to be used for verification of research.
Many years back while in grad school I could not reproduce a result from a paper. Thankfully they had provided the data as public but not the code. I emailed the authors and got some matlab code back. My university didn't have a matlab subscription. Octave saved me there since the syntax is similar.
But with something like mathematica and the price of it you will never be able to have a wide verification of the result if the software is not free.
Also, a lot of things in industry gain traction first in academia (especially math tools). So unless academic traction is dealt with mathematica's headway in industry will remain limited. They are still a profitable company. So I'm guessing there are deep pocketed clients who purchase the tooling.
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True but also for a one of piracy exists just use a cracked copy of it and be done with it
Mathematica has a lot of clients in math and engineering. Traditionally these clients are not so concerned about software engineering issues you mention. What Mathematica offers also makes sense for small firms with a few engineers, because they can leverage their vast amount of ready to use functions and libraries. But I agree that for medium to large size companies it stops making sense.
The situation you’re describing is probably why Python is the defacto language of Machine Learning to this day.